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All those SS15 pictures a few posts above look incredible. I'm in love with that collection. Thank you for creating such wonderful clothing. I look forward to seeing more of your work and would love to own a piece or two in the near future.

"Radicalissimmo" Paris video

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Thanks patR and AVerdantShore,

Now up:

The official video shot by Jerome Chichet in Paris of our "Radicalissimmo" men's collection
presentation for SS2016 last month. Another remarkable experience with so many remarkable
people. Many thanks to everyone who was involved. For photos of the show you can go here (thanks to SZ-mag for all the coverage), hope you enjoy viewing it as much
as we had doing it….

The official video shot by Jerome Chichet in Paris of our "Radicalissimmo" men's collection
presentation for SS2016 last month. Another remarkable experience with so many remarkable
people. Many thanks to everyone who was involved. For photos of the show you can go here (thanks to SZ-mag for all the coverage), hope you enjoy viewing it as much
as we had doing it….

.

This was a terrific show Geoffrey!! Congrats again and on your new accounts in the US, I will be in NY before the end of the summer and surely will have a look. You have left a lasting impression here in Toronto, I've received some great feedback on the FW15 and SS16 shows from friends/clients.

Via Spalato: beyond the photos (part 1)

Thanks so much Nic and to Matteo Carcelli for his beautiful shots. It was great to have you all over here in the workrooms, we hope to see more of our dealers in the future here where we create all the clothes.

In reference to some recent discussions taking place on another thread, I will take the liberty here to use the photos above of Via Spalato to emphasize that this is the total opposite of a Moldavian outsource factory op and the mindset that agrees to and performs such decisions and thinking. Here, 10 of us now work at one thing and one thing only- to create the best clothes human beings can make in the world today. That is all we are driven to do. And to do that we need great human beings and we accept the fact that we need to be able to pay for them and keep them working with us. So, we don't do anything to "cut" or "save" on our labor costs.

In fact, we are raising them. Every day. We are one of the only companies in our industry at the moment in all of Italy that is hiring . In less than 2 years, we have already tripled our staff size and we intend to continue even more. Some are now even coming from beyond Italy (one from Spain and soon one from the US) as we build a super world-class team. You see, we believe in human beings when they are trained right, treated with respect, and given the right atmosphere and environment to thrive in and reach their true potential. And it is working. That is how we believe this little revolution is slowly going to win this game in the future. We have discovered that doing everything in-house, when done the right way, is not more expensive, but actually less expensive, more efficient, and much better at creativity and quality than outsourcing. That is heresy for any student of classical US (and now global) business-school management. But it all comes down to how intelligent and how great you want your organization, your product, and your art, to be. Several leading MBA programs in Italy have already invited us to speak to them about this revolutionary new philosophy of business and managerial thinking in the luxury fashion industry precisely because it is so contrarian to the current norm which now has overtaken even some of our most revered brands in the "SZ" family of designers.

But for me, I am done with all the compromises of working for somebody else, be it a licensee, a backer, or partners. Some can see the production of their ideas suddenly being shifted out to a place and a concept like a Moldavian production program and all its ramifications, and find it acceptable for them. But not me. I couldn't when it happened to me years ago with my Italian license deal, and I can't today.

Now don't get me wrong. Rick Owens, Carol Christian Poell, Maurizio Altieri and I all started out in the circuit in the same generation. I go way back with all of them. My first retail store client in the world was the same as Rick's. We were both with Charles Gallay at the same time and we almost showed together in the mid-90's in Paris at Charles' request long before Rick ever showed in Paris or even New York by himself. When Gallay retired and closed the doors of his last store on Sunset Blvd, the only collections he still believed in were in that store, and they were Rick Owens (that he was making himself in LA at the time) and us (that we were making in Boston). My first agent in Milan in the late 90's was Carol Christian Poell's first agent as well for the world, Daniele Ghiselli. And Maurizio and I both shared our first presentation experiences showing next to each other on the banks of the Seine in tents at Jean Pierre Fain's legendary original Paris sur Mode. Over the years, we each went our different ways, and for better or for worse, took different paths and destinies as we went along. More often than not, our collections would find themselves hanging in the same stores around the world at various times in our careers. I respect and admire each one of these colleagues and their contributions, as well as many others, and more often than not, and more often than most people here will ever know, understand the reasons behind why certain things have gone in certain ways, if you will.

For my part I had fought a 20-year battle to be an independent working in America, not necessarily by choice (there was a reason both Rick and I eventually moved to Europe). By the late 90's, there were some very huge challenges in keeping that battle alive. And I, like so many others in the game at that time including Martin Margiela, Helmut Lang, the Capasa brothers at Costume National, Raf Simons, Dirk Bikkembergs, Dirk Schoenberger, Ann Demeulemeester, Dean and Dan at D2, Jean Colonna, Martine Sitbon, John Richmond, Alexander McQueen, Hussein Chalayan, Vivienne Westwood, and yes Rick Owens too, and so so many exciting and good design people at that time who were facing or had faced similar pressures, basically threw in the towel and if we could- if we had gotten to a certain level in the game- started to talk with the swarms of Italian System fashion producers and their agents about a possible license and production deal to make our collection in Italy. And make no mistake about it, while you may be laughing at some of those names for what they represent now in fashion today, back then they were doing very good work. And I mean very good, all of them, believe me. Their work has changed because the system changed it and changed them. And that is part of why you must understand a designer's processes to understand his or her design results. And why the selection of the production strategy is so critical to the final design and characteristics of the product created from it. Once you go with the "System," the system will start to design your collections more than you.

Production dictates design. Always.

But first, the system people had to get you hooked and reeled in. They threw you a tempting cocktail of ideas: money, backing, incredible technical capability, access to beautiful Italian fabrics, way more press and magazine coverage for you and your work, the "big show" in Paris, a whole new level of distribution and growth for your collection and the realization of what your design dreams were hoping to accomplish for the past few decades of your life (instead of eating packaged ramen every day so you could make your payroll tomorrow and your rent on Monday and just keep your dream alive). That was the courting phase, and boy for all of us, it sounded great.

You see, that was the game in those days. Get started and go as far as you can as an independent, then get yourself signed in Italy with the right producer and get to the big-time numbers with the System. Once you got to the big numbers, there were a variety of strategies and things you could do next. Jean-Paul Gaultier led the way with Gibo Spa in the late 80's and rocketed to becoming a global star. God, if even a french indy star moves his production to Italy, then that has got to mean something, right? Damn right. Gaultier was followed in 1990 by Helmut Lang at Gibo after a less than super-stint with Zamasport, and let me tell you people… Helmut at Gibo rocked. And Gibo was selling Helmut to the world at Daniele Ghiselli in Milan, and that was why both Carol and I and even Raf Simons for his first collection, all ended up there. Then there was Alexander McQueen, who rather than waste a decade or so actually trying to build and grow an independent business that actually sold and made anything, saw right through it all and appraised the game at the time for exactly what it was.

The name of the game was name. So McQueen, using his extensive local resource strengths by being not only the genius that he was but a genius in London (where if nothing else, if you had the stuff--and he had it, you could pull off some pretty amazing shows for the international press that would be seen), simply did 4 impossible-to-ignore live catwalk presentations over several seasons with no intention of selling a single design, but rather to build his name as fast as he could to simply to attract the attention and the securing of a deal with the right backer. That backer turned out to be Gibo once again, and the rest was history.

Gibo was a unique power in the field, a Tuscan producer that had been bought outright by the Japanese powerhouse Kashiyama/Onward to lock up both rising avant-garde designer talent and research and wider distribution and production possibilities using that talent and research across their main markets in Japan and Asia where they were, and still are, a mass market force-- one of the earlier examples of global investment in designer Paris level collections, and not the easiest people to deal with. I can say this, because at one point in my career they were talking with us about a deal as well, and I felt like I was being handled by a mafia group, figuratively, if not literally (the real mafia is well involved in our industry but not with them), but these were some of the real original system players in the game, and they knew how to play it rough when it was to their advantage. Especially with designers. But it wasn't just them... ask anyone who knows what Ford, Del Sole, and the Kering people did to Hussein Chalayan back in those days, for example.

Eventually, in December 1999, I did sign a deal and after just a few quick months into my "Made in Italy" licensing deal arrangement in Italy with an Italian producer, I found myself suddenly by force in a very sad place called Baiu Mare deep inside Transylvania (really), in the country of Romania, watching my collection being made there because the Italians with whom I had signed the contract and given the rights to produce, distribute, and finance the collection with my name on it, had suddenly decided they did not want to make it anymore in Italy.

(continued from above) Via Spalato: beyond the photos

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The 1999 article in MilanoFinanza announcing the licensing deal
for our collection to be made in Italy, on the same page that Dolce
& Gabbana were claiming to be reaching the 230 billion lire annual
sales mark. The news of the licensing deal quickly generated press
coverage in Europe and at home...

Article in the Boston Herald announcing the licensing deal and my decision to
close our 20-year old Boston firm and move everything to the Veneto region in
order to concentrate 100 percent on the new made in Italy project.

A french magazine spread in Paris announcing the Italian production
deal and its goal to make a new made in Italy production version from
new materials of our successful recycled collections that we had made
famous from Boston.

YOU SEE Romania was the Moldavia of its time in the late 90's and early naughties.
Since then, as you can learn in the RAI 3 piece I posted already on the Rick Owens' thread, Romania has been used up and spit out in less than a decade by the slash-and-burn economic policies of the Italian Fashion Production System mafia.

"For the price of one Italian, I can have 10 Romanians" my producer told me at the time- "Made in Italy is not important anymore… we can say Made in the EU instead."

Further excuses were then added that after months of promising me that technically they had everyone they needed to make our collection (which was technically very special and tough because of its recycled approach--it was unique then and we were famous for it), that in fact:

1. they were afraid it would cost too much-- the labor costs would be prohibitive to produce our ideas which we had been producing for 14 seasons in Boston,

and then 2. the real whammy, that in fact, they didn't even really have the people that knew how to do it. After searching for months, there was no laboratorio in the area that either had the skill or the desire to produce our collection as it was intended to be done. The pieces were too much work and not in enough volume to make it worth it for them to even try. The licensee had already botched the sales of the first season so badly that our collection sales had dropped by about 70 percent from the previous season which had been run by us and produced in Boston that our production numbers were totally reduced making us very unattractive to get made in an Italian factory.

So, even though I had signed a contract with them to do GBS made in Italy, I suddenly learned the hard way that it was all turning out to be a lie and a scam. They really had no intention of making my collection in Italy, they just wanted to put my name on their stuff, not mine, that they could make wherever the margin could be the highest.

And there I was, stuck in a factory with 80 people in Baiu Mare and 1 month to make 50 different styles with an average run of about 5 pieces each. Not a very easy job at all. The producers were so incompetent, they now had to force me to go in and run the production myself. I did so and the 80 people worked hard and with the supreme help of 5 of their top people, one of whom could speak some English, we got it all done together. While I was there, I saw and felt a sadness that pervade an entire people, culture and society that I will never forget.

The factory owner was a big fat guy ex-Communist apparatchik for the Ciaucescu regime (do you know what that means?) And when he discovered I was an American designer, suddenly offered the factory and all of its people to me for rent on a monthly basis of 50 thousand dollars a month whenever I wanted it. Unlike all of the others in that place, he seemed fine and happy.

Women in the town were naked. They wore almost no clothes and they attacked any Italian men working there on production jobs like swarms of mosquitoes. You had to be careful. The problem of Italian men falling prey to women in Romania was rampant. Back home in the Veneto one family after another was getting destroyed because of it. Daddy has left home for someone he met in Romania. And for the women in Romania, it wasn't love--it was survival and a way to get out. It was business pure and simple. If it wasn't outright prostitution, it was damn close. Eastern Europe was already well on its way to becoming a world leader in the trafficking, prostitution, porn and sex industries, so it should have come as no suprise. But the impact when you are there is a whole different ballgame. It got so bad, that producers had come to realize a new internal rule of not allowing any of their tecnicos ("production technicians") to go to work in Romania for any period longer than 3 weeks to reduce the chances of getting hooked by a Romanian lover. The guys would disappear (they were always men) into the country and not show up for work for months on end.

And this also was part of the system, a cost of doing the business.

I was informed by the staff that the factory worked for everyone Hilfiger, Boss, H&M et al... and then was shown one very large room where a mountain of garments all in the same fabric, and all in the same pant model were piled from the floor to the ceiling. It was a weird sight, there must have been 10 thousand pieces thrown into that room onto the not-so-clean floor and then on to each other, a real mountain of cloth. The cloth was grey and when you touched it you could feel a lot of poly, and the pieces were half made but the labels were already sewn in: Zara. I was quickly told that Zara was their biggest customer by numbers of pieces, and that they paid the least per piece and most importantly they paid the slowest of all. Hence, the mountain of unfinished pants stuffed into the huge dark room, and the thought that even though the wages and the labor costs were so low, and the work so hard, and so much of it, that the buyer would still delay payment for all that work and all those people--or maybe not even end up paying for it at all. Always a risk in this end of the game. I felt the sadness and remembered the name on the label.

When I found out that the average pay for workers in Romania and the plant I was standing in was significantly less than 200 bucks a month (and that no, it was not enough for people living there to get by on, even with their cost of living where they were, as they told me continually all through the month I was there), I asked my producer on the phone if he could at least give the top five people that had helped me there another 50 each for the month that they worked with, and for me, so hard and so well. He immediately and bluntly refused, and hung up on me, as if I too was one of them.

And in some ways I was. I did not even have the cash in my own pocket at that time to give out the 50 to the five people myself. I too was waiting for a payment from the producer. And I was stuck here against my will in this sad, sad place far away from both home and dream, a puppet with all the strings being pulled from above to make me do whatever they wanted me to do.

At that point, I decided that the license world, the backed designer, and that life, was over for me, and that one way or another I was going to get out of it, and spend the rest of my f___ing life doing something about this sick industry, and doing something better for anyone anywhere that was fed up with the corporate bullshit, the slavery, the abuse, and the degradation of this Art which had brought us all to our knees, most of all the designers, the so-called creatives, the artists,… those who were supposed be the ones to bring in new ideas, forms and beauty into this genre but in the end are just little more than fancy mouthpieces, PR pawns, and names to use up and spit out when the time is right.

Wow, thanks for the story so far. a very good read, very insightful and informative

The struggle is real in this industry, this isn't something new. Would really be great if there would be a documentary about this from the designers perspective, but they of course would need to jeopardize their careers for this.
It is a survival of the fittest...

thanks a lot for this Post Geoffrey. as a student of this business I am very much aware of your experiences, albeit not with the kind of firsthand knowledge that comes with your own personal experience and the perplexity and angst involved.

I think the previous two posts (and the one to follow) is a must read by anyone who really want to honestly know how this industry works and the sacrifice that is always needed to accomplish what we do.
This industry and its effects have worn down, eaten away at and killed many of its greatest practitioners.......

“You know,” he says, with a resilient smile, “it is a hard world for poets.”
.................................................. .......................

Right on, my friend and esteemed colleague. And if anyone has the right to speak on these issues you do. One of the very few out there making his own stuff, and knowing what that all means. If half of those people out there got themselves in front of a cutting table and a sewing machine and a hot iron and spent a few days finding out what creating and making clothes is really all about, then all these issues wouldn't even exist. The problem is that there are just too many fakers out there. But all that is going to change in the world that is coming up for all of us sooner than we think. Keep it up Zam, and thanks for your comment. Part 3 up now..

(continued from above) Via Spalato: beyond the photos part 3

I HAD TO GET OUT of the license deal.
In the meantime for about a year, the licensee did everything they could to ruin me. They stopped paying me, cut all logistical support, botched the collections, and by the time it was over and the license was broken, I lost everything I had built up for over 2 decades in Boston, my clients, my name and reputation, and my ability to produce anything (I didn't even have a sewing machine of my own anymore). My wife Diana and my 2-year old twins were with me now stuck in a tiny country town in the middle of nowhere in the mainland from Venice. We couldn't get back to the US, so we had to start all over from scratch in the kitchen of the apartment we were living in on the Via dei Martiri in Cavarzere. I bought a Singer home sewing machine just like the one I had used in my parent's attic in 1979 to start my firm at the very beginning in Boston and made 2 orders for a client in Reggio Emilia who had a good store at the time called Sette (7). I delivered them to him by car in person and got paid with a couple of post-dated checks. That was more money than the licensee had given me in almost a year, and suddenly I could pay rent and buy some real groceries for the family. I was back as an independent producer and artist once again, and this time, I vowed to myself i would never lose my freedom or independence again for the rest of my working days on this earth.

That was the beginning of Geoffrey B. Small Made in Italy- an idea for an independently owned firm that would become a fully integrated Italian design and production company specialized in pure research collections and making the best clothes in the world possible today, and nothing less-- and I will never forget those days.

I too was treated like a Romanian slave or a Moldavian by that system, I know what that felt like, and I vowed to myself, my family, and my metier, that someday we would show those f_____rs another way of doing things.

I am sorry if this sounds so personal, but it is. This is a personal business and when it is done well, the personal passion, drive, and commitments bring out the very best in all of us and the metier shines bright and far for the world to see. But when the accountants and the users and the corporations take it over, and it is bad… it is really bad.

All that pain took place for me over 15 years ago but those wounds still pierce the memory and drive my motivation like a big Ferrari motorcar on steroids with its gas pedal totally pushed to the floor… Since then we have kept hard at building the dream of a different kind of design company and new kind of clothing art, one tiny step at a time. We went from 1 person and a Singer home machine in the kitchen, to 3 people working in 2 apartments then 5 people in 3 apartments all in the same building, and now we are over 10 of us in a 300 square meter (3000sq ft) laboratorio workroom space where Matteo's pictures were taken on the Via Spalato in the same town of Cavarzere Venezia.

These people are not getting paid 175 euros a month like the Romanians I shared a factory floor with years ago, or 120 euros a month like a Moldavian today. They are fully legal contracted Italian Law employees, with full health coverage, pension benefits, paid sick days, 1 year pregnancy, 2 days paid vacation for every month worked, and a minimum wage that with benefits and paid in contributions easily reaches 15 dollars an hour for even the newest youngest recruit. Next week, they get fully paid summer vacation for almost 3 weeks by law paid entirely by our firm. And on top of that, here in Italy we pay one of the highest rates of tax on business income and profits (up to 70% for individual proprietors) and sales (the VAT is a whopping 22%). But I do it to be here, and to be a real Made in Italy company. One of the final few if you will. One of the proud, the brave, and the mighty.

Are we paying more than Moldavia? Hell yes, because frankly our people are worth more, we make more money by investing in them and keeping them. This is a very serious technology company underneath the hood, and we need and are willing to pay for the best brains, hearts and hands that we can get. After all, everyday we are going up against all of the corporations mentioned previously and others like the people running them, all over the global industry. And believe me, they are all basically predatory in nature, if you get my drift.

But we fear none of them- as long as we continue to push the envelope of the Art and the value of our works further and further beyond our wildest dreams. We have no backers and our bank lends us nothing, we don't need it. Our backers are our customers, and we aim to keep it that way. I came to Italy 15 years ago for one reason: to make the best clothes in the world. After surviving the license deal nightmare, I was able with the help of my wife Diana and our young tiny family to begin the long road to pursuing that goal and building that dream. All along the way our sales growth has averaged 10-15 percent a year, until 2013 when it started to reach upwards to a phenomenal 40-50 percent a year. Our margins are strong, and our handwork technologies even more so, and we are seeking more great people to join what we believe is the greatest sartoria operation in the world today. A team of human beings of such exceptional abilities, talents and motivation to master and then push- the art and science of designing and creating clothes by hand to new horizons, of which there are few if any left in the world to compare to. Maybe the workrooms at Dior, or Chanel, but ours is an entirely new idea for an entirely new age and time. And frankly, we are only just beginning… as our most recent and upcoming collections will soon prove themselves to be.

It's all about a revaluation of the intelligent human being and what he or she is truly worth in this industry and in this world. That is why I find the move to produce in an environment like Moldavia by one of our most successful and esteemed colleagues from the commercial point of view to be so disappointing for the metier, the community, and the customer that I must speak up about it and the reasons why. I am sorry to be so persistent on it, but having been a victim of such decisions and a witness to what those decisions do to the people affected by them and the type of product and work and effects on the society and the community around us that results, I cannot stand by and watch silent like so many others may. I will speak up about it and why, and I will continue to lobby my esteemed and yes, respected, colleague(s) to find the courage to stand up to the system and change their decisions and strategies and do better for themselves and for all of us on this planet and this race we call ourselves as humanity. Leading designers can have an influence and play a role where our industry and even our society is headed towards. I know this from personal experience, and I believe that designers whose names appear on successful commercial brand labels with worldwide distributions should reflect seriously on their positions as spokespeople and role models in a society today that places such unprecedented attention and interest on fashion and its related interests.

As a designer, I must stress that this is not a new 'bandwagon thing' for me- as we are now seeing amongst so many suddenly recently relabeled "sustainability-conscious, environmentally-concerned, ethically-aware" designers, brands and global multinational corporations (who just happen to specialize in fast fashion or luxury clothing financial merger & acquisition). Sorry, but we wrote the book on this kind of stuff. We have been doing sustainable hand made clothes-making since 1979, recycled design & production since we showed it in Paris in 1993, activist-themed collections for decades in Paris including our political message and commercially-suicidal anti Iraq invasion, Napoleonic, Medieval, and anti-nuclear collections- even supporting the Occupy Movement when it was extremely unpopular to do so (for evidence see our thread here on SZ back in 2012).

So when the videos below were filmed almost 4 years ago we were already well on our way to building the world's leading model for sustainable design and ethical creation and manufacture. In fact, without us, most of these characters in the industry now would never even have thought about or be talking about this kind of thing today at all if they could help it in the first place. You can trace it right to the foreword page I wrote for Sass Brown's "ECO-DESIGN" book, where most of them are quoting their numbers and their new mission statements from today.

But we are sick and tired of talking about things.

Quietly, steadily, just as we have been doing for the past three and a half decades, we just work at it. We don't talk about it. We prefer to do it. Day and night, in the workrooms here at Cavarzere and our incredible GBS key supplier partners all across Italy, in our world presentations in Paris, and with the sales staffs and on the selling floors of our exclusive authorized dealer partners around the planet- we continue to work at it- not just creating the most beautiful clothes in the world we possibly can, but also building a dream... of a new kind of company and a new kind of art for the 21st century. And before it's too late, to show to a new generation of customers and practitioners in the field, that yes indeed, there is a better way play this game, for everyone involved.

With many thanks to SZ for giving us the platform, to each of you for reading and hopefully understanding, and to Alan Grazioso and Cengage for the documentary and release permission to show his wonderful documentary work on us from 2012 here below...

thank you

Thanks Arkady, DudleyGray and Torchiere, it's an honor and a pleasure to have you read the posts and have your comments. And thanks to everyone else who has been reading us lately. It was an emotional thing to go through it all over again and write about it, but again, I do think that if enough members on the forum become aware of things, then make their feelings known, smart companies out there will listen up and start making some changes. And if that happens, well it sure was worthwhile. SZ is an important medium right now, let's keep it that way. I am planning a very quick round-the-world trip with stops in Berlin, Shanghai, LA and NY, if any of you are in these towns, maybe we can get a chance to meet each other, if not as always thanks again, and remember to never give up. Best wishes, Geoffrey & the Team

Mr. Small, I tried on one of your coats at Hotoveli a few weeks back, right around when the sales associate informed me it had arrived. It was a bit of a transcendent experience just to turn around in it in front of the mirror -- almost as wonderful as the experience of reading your insightful and heartfelt commentary. This world needs more people like you.